Staying Alive While Black in America
A few days ago, the grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri refused to convict Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of Michael Brown. Many young black men are shot dead daily either from white brutality or police brutality and the statistics are staggering. It is a fact that there are few black men who actually kill cops and yet police are threatened by the young black man. It begs the question, why are the cops killing young black men in the thousands?
In the history of America, many young white males liked killing black people as they travelled along the motorways. This practice was known as lynching, where vigilante mobs acted as the judge, jury and highway patrolmen of public roads they didn’t own. As the light began to shine on these cowardly clandestine activities and organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center began demanding prosecution of these perpetrators their activities slowed down. The passage of the Civil Rights Act elevated the rights of minorities and helped to end brutality against blacks and other minorities.
During the Reagan era, police departments began to readily recruit former vigilantes as policemen. Using cleverly coded language that appealed to Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members and practicing terrorists to apply for cop jobs. The regular law abiding cops who respected the law were labelled soft on crime and replaced with these vigilantes. Over the decades young white men who would have been vigilantes joined the police force and are responsible for a lot of police brutality. Killing a young black is a prize for them; if they could they would kill all black people in America. Cops are rarely ever prosecuted for murdering young black men. While this may not seem fair, it is the story of America and white people are more equal than minorities.
Given this background young black men MUST stay alive by:
- Obey every police officer’s instruction at all costs because a live dog is better than a dead lion.
- Stay calm when provoked, practice this at home if need be.
- Study passive resistance tactics it kept thousands alive during the civil rights era.
- Realize that as a black person, particularly you are lower in hierarchy in the eyes of the cops and society in general.
- Turn your phone video recorder on when approached by a policeman.
- Make a mental note of the officer’s name.
- Make sure your car registration and identity information are up to date.
- Make sure that your license is up to date if you have moved.
- Make sure your car insurance is up to date.
- Tell the cop of every move before you make it, for example, “I am opening the glove compartment to get my registration, so that the policeman doesn’t feel threatened.
There are some young black people who believe that Martin Luther King was weak because he advocated peaceful resistance. The reality is that he kept millions of black people alive. The militarized police force would have loved nothing better than to test their ammunition on some black people and their white sympathizers.
Ronald Reagan who supported apartheid policies in South Africa cemented his legacy this way by creating the idea that blacks perpetrated crimes and built bigger prisons and privatized prison to give his friends contracts. These prisons made money when they were full and the incentive was to get as many black youth into prison so that they could get paid.
